Calder said he needed a day to retrieve the hard drive on which he had kept the GRASP data. It wasn’t at the school but at a private storage facility. He said he would call as soon as he had the material ready for pickup.
Ballard had driven them both in her city car so they wouldn’t have to worry about legit parking both their private cars, but before they left, Bosch asked to be dropped off at the nearby Exposition Park.
“Why?” she asked.
“I’ve never seen the shuttle,” he said. “I thought I’d check it out.”
The decommissioned space shuttle Endeavour had been flown to L.A. six years earlier, slowly moved through the streets of South-Central, and put on permanent display inside the air and space center at the park.
Ballard smiled at the thought of Bosch in the air and space museum.
“You don’t seem like a space-travel guy, Harry.”
“I’m not really. Just want to look at it to know it’s really true.”
“You mean you’re a conspiracy-theory guy, then? Like the space program was a hoax? Fake news?”
“No, no, not like that. I believe it. It’s just kind of amazing, you know, to think we could send those things up, circle the moon, fix satellites, and do whatever they were doing and we can’t fix things down here. I just wanted to see it once, ever since they brought it here. I was…”
He trailed off like he was unsure he should continue.
“What?” Ballard prompted.
“Nah, I was just going to say, I was in Vietnam back in ’69,” Bosch said. “Way before you were even born, I know. And on this one day, I had just gotten back to base camp on Airmobile after a hairy op where we had to clear the enemy out of a tunnel system. That’s what I did over there. It was late morning and the place was completely deserted. It was like a ghost town because everybody was sitting in their tents, listening to their radios. Neil Armstrong was about to walk on the moon and they all wanted to hear it…
“And it was the same thing, you know? How did we put a guy up there bouncing around on the moon when things were so fucked up down here? I mean, that morning during the op…I had to kill a guy. In the tunnel. I was nineteen years old.”
Bosch was looking out his window. He almost seemed to be talking to himself.
“Harry, I’m really sorry,” Ballard said. “That you were put in that situation at that age. At any age.”
“Yeah, well…” Bosch said. “That’s the way it was.”
He didn’t say anything further. Ballard could feel the fatigue coming off him like a wave.
“You still want to see the shuttle?” she asked. “How will you get back to your car at the station?”
“Yeah, drop me off. I can grab a taxi or an Uber after.”
She started the car and drove the few blocks over to the park. They didn’t speak. She got him as close as she could to the giant building that housed the shuttle.
“I’m not sure they’re going to be open yet,” Ballard said.
“It’s okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll find something to do.”
“After this, you should go home and get a nap. You seem tired, Harry.”
“That’s a good idea.”
He opened his door, then looked back at Ballard before getting out.
“Just so you know, I’m done at San Fernando,” he said. “So I’m fully committed to the Daisy case.”
“What do you mean ‘done’?” Ballard asked. “What happened?”
“I sort of messed things up. My witness getting killed, that’s going to be on me. I didn’t do enough to protect him. Then things happened yesterday between me and the guy who leaked it and I got suspended by the chief. Being a reserve, there are no protections so…I’m just done. That’s it.”
Ballard waited to see if he would say more but he didn’t.
“So…the woman you were looking for all night,” she said. “That wasn’t part of that case?”
“No,” Bosch said. “That was Daisy’s mother. I came home and she’d split. Sorry you never got the chance to talk to her.”
“It’s okay,” Ballard said. “You think she went back to the life?”
Bosch shrugged.
“I hit all her familiars last night,” he said. “Nobody had seen her. But those were only the places I knew of. She could have had others. Places to score and crash. People who would take her in. She might’ve just hopped on a Greyhound and split, too. That’s what I’m hoping. But I’ll keep looking when I can.”
Ballard nodded. That seemed to be the end of the conversation but she wanted to tell him something. Just as he started to get out, she spoke.
“My father went to Vietnam,” she said. “You remind me of him.”
“That right?” Bosch said. “He live here in L.A.?”
“No, I lost him when I was fourteen. But during the war, he came to Hawaii on…what was it called, furlough?”
“Yeah, or liberty. I went to Hawaii a few times. They didn’t let you go back to CONUS, so you could go to Hong Kong, Sydney, a few other places. But Hawaii was the best.”
“What was CONUS?”
“Continental United States. They didn’t want you going back to the mainland because of all the protests. But if you worked things right in Honolulu, you could sneak onto a flight in civvies and get back to L.A.”
“I don’t think my dad did that. He met my mother in Hawaii and then after the war he came back and stayed.”
“A lot of guys did that.”
“He was from Ventura originally, and after I was born, we would visit my grandmother there—once a year—but he didn’t like coming back. He saw it like you do. A fucked-up world. He just wanted to camp on the beach and surf.”
Bosch nodded.
“I get that. He was smart and I was the fool. I came back and thought I could do something about things.”
Before Ballard could respond, Bosch got out of the car and closed the door. Ballard watched him walk toward the building where they kept the space shuttle. She noticed a slight limp in his walk.
“I didn’t mean it like that, Harry,” she said out loud.